Parley Vouz Health & Social Care? (An A to Z of Carespeak)

A:

Accessing the Community: Whereas you and I go out, learning disabled people access the community. It means the same thing. This activity usually involves window shopping in the precinct but may occasionally involve a Panda Cola from the newsagents.

Assessment & Treatment Units: A warehouse where learning disabled people are incarcerated, often for many years, to stop them spoiling the appearance of the community.

Apple Catchers: Very popular activity amongst NHS movers and shakers. Usually undertaken after shakers have shaken the apple cart on which the apples reside.

B:

Berryman: Modern slang. “To do a Berryman” means to do your Father’s dirty work for him.

Best Interests: What a group of professionals decide is the best way of living your life. Often involves removal from family home and incarceration in assessment and treatment unit (see A)

Boat Rocker: Currently fashionable with Radical Change Agents (See “R”). Boat can only be rocked from the inside. Woe betide anyone who tries to rock the boat from the outside.

Bubb Breakfasts: Where the great & good gather under a noble Sir for bangers and streaky and change the world.

C:

Candour: Obviously different meaning from common usage. Something the Minister for health calls for, every seven months or so.

Care Navigator: A newish replacement for a professional that assesses you. Not sure what they’re navigating but they don’t wear goggles or bomber jackets.

Care Quality Commission: Seen within the trade as a bunch of busybodies. Probably akin to the X Factor Panel (but for Care Homes & Hospitals)

Carer: Very little known of this species but said to be fond of cardigans and moaning about their lot.

Carers UK: The collective noun for the Carer (see above). A tribe who encourage people to knit or hold coffee mornings so their members can buy more cardigans.

Challenging Behaviour: Believed by some to be people in distress trying to be understood. In professional circles seen as justification for anti psychotic medication regime & incarceration in Assessment & Treatment Unit (see above).

Challenging Behaviour Foundation: An evangelical group who gain a lot of attention by calling for things. Known to work best in pairs.

Lilley: A modern euphemism (“To do a Lilley”) meaning to throw aspersions at reports into uninvestigated deaths & then run a mile.

M:

Measurable Outcomes: Having everything you do logged and judged.

Mencap: A collective who give voices to people without voices and are always in the papers, calling out for things.

Mental Capacity Act: An 11 year old piece of legislation that is widely ignored by professionals as it is still “being bed in”.

Modern Way (The): Will probably be the old fashioned way by the time you read this.

Multi Disciplinary Meetings: A get together of anybody who is anybody. Except you of course.

N:

Needs: A catalogue of things that mark you out as not quite human. Nobody else on the planet has these things.

O:

Occupational Therapy: Three years of intensive, intrusive assessments to get a bed pan.

One Page Profile: Reducing your whole life to one side of a piece of A4 paper. Popular amongst a certain group of happy clappers.

Outcomes: Something we can use to withdraw your entire support package. Fail to meet a nebulous outcome and, whoosh, watch that support disappear.

Outsourcing: Getting rid of all those expensive things. A win win because you can get rid of accountability as well.

P:

Panel: Modelled on the Masonic Lodge, this is a mythical gathering of people with extraordinary powers who wear hoods and masks.

Parental Grooming: A novel & well researched theory that a solitary parent can manipulate a whole team of multi disciplinary professionals into his/her way of thinking.

Passionate: An emotion felt and shouted from the rooftops by Radical Change Agents (See R) about any word in this dictionary.

Pathways: Not sure. But modelled on Hampton Court Maze.

Patient Passport: Similar to the One Page Profile but something that lets the medical profession know that you’re not quite human.

Personalisation: Putting you at the periphery of your life.

Person Centred Plan: A chance to exercise our power by saying “No” to everything you want to do with your life.

Personal Budget: How to become a director of your own company overnight when all you wanted was some support to go swimming.

Placement: A place where not quite humans are caged. Not to be confused with a home.

Pooled Budget: Spending your money on things that another resident at your placement wants to do but that you have no interest in.

Positive Behaviour Support: An opportunity for a whole army of professionals from Kent to tell you that you are being inappropriate.

Prone Restraint: A popular Positive Behaviour Support strategy that involves being pinned face down on the floor at a time when you are most distressed.

Provider: Someone who sends a person to your placement for £4.65 per hour and enjoys great holidays in Barbados.

Putting People First: That doesn’t mean you. I said “People” – you’re not “People”.

Q:

Q: An NHS scheme that was all the rage in August 2015 but had died a death by September 2015.

R:

Radical Change Agent: A self appointed title by people whose most radical thing they’ve ever done is to eat humus.

Re-ablement Not sure. It implies that you had ablement, lost it, and are being given it back again.

Resource Allocation System: A clunky machine full of algorithms that reduces your non human status to a monetary value.

Risk Assessment: A cunning tool used to disguise the failure to spend money on adequate support. (I.E. “You can’t go bowling. You might drop the ball on your toe”).

Risk Management: (See Risk Assessment above). A means by which we can stop you doing practically anything.

S:

Safeguarding: Looking after the organisation’s reputation.

Self Funder: A successful West End Farce, subtitled “Whoops. There Goes My Inheritance”.

Service User: Someone who can’t use non existant services.

Signposting: A social care sat-nav to nowhere.

Spit Hood: Another favourite of the Positive Behaviour Crowd. It covers your head completely when you are at your most distressed.

Stakeholder: Anyone who can make a bit of money out of you.

Starprism: A title given to those who have been showing some leader love and doing some top notch brown nosing.

T:

Therapeutic Intervention: A wide range of tools that includes incarceration in an assessment and treatment unit (see A), an anti psychotic drug habit, prone restraint (See P) or use of a Spit Hood (See S).

Toxic: A term of endearment bestowed usually by psychiatrists on grieving family members.

Transforming Care: A Civil Servant, locked in an office and desperately going through a therasorus to find new names for discredited ideas.

Transition: That moment when your world is turned upside down.

Transparency: Another thing that the Minister for Health calls for every seven months. When achieved, it produces more mist than a Meat Loaf video.

U:

Ulysses: A thoroughly modern computer system where you can lose all sorts of deaths you’ve classified as “natural causes”.